Sources of Feedback

It may seem unnecessary to say it, but feedback requires data—some kind of observation of your peoples’ decisions and behaviors and the results that stem from them—to be examined against expectations and judged accordingly. While “judgment” may seem like a harsh word to use, it’s the correct one, as many of goals and expectations will still require a certain amount of interpretation and/or human evaluation. (We talk more about this in the “Metrics” section.)

Personal observations#

It really should go without saying that your own personal observations of your direct report will be useful. What may require saying, though, is that this should not be your only source of feedback. Although it will be easier to just “trust your own eyes and ears” and use that, remember that you’re part of management now, and like it or not, people treat their boss a little differently than they do others around them.

King of the Room: As a consultant, it’s often the case that I’m escorted into a meeting room with little to no background on who all the meeting participants are. Even so, I’ve found it possible to identify the relative positions in the org structure by observing communication patterns, and in particular who “closes out” a particular topic—the biggest boss is the one that people are either hesitant to disagree with, or who has their opinions most often accepted directly without challenge. I’ve noticed this behavior even in myself when I’ve worked full-time roles. It’s hard to tell the person who holds your paycheck in their hands (figuratively speaking) that they’re wrong. (And in many cases, that’s why they hired a consultant in the first place: to tell the boss that they’re wrong, and here’s why.) Keep this in mind when you’re listening to your direct reports—they won’t deliberately deceive you most of the time, but they’ll also be likely to mentally edit things a little differently than when they’re with their peers, friends, or family.

Certainly, your personal observations are important, because you can look for the things that you’ve discussed with your direct in terms of their concrete expectations that others might not know to look for. But don’t use that as your only source of input.

Metrics#

We spend more time discussing metrics as a means of feedback in the “Metrics” chapter, but suffice it to say that if you have established some clear and as-objective-as-possible metrics by which to measure your report’s progress, you have a ready and handy source of feedback by which to judge their performance. Keep in mind that this should never be the sole source of feedback, however, merely another data point by which to evaluate. In many cases, the metrics can help sharpen your vision in other areas—if an employee is getting all their stories in on time on a regular basis, but bugs keep appearing in the code they worked on, it may be that they are rushing their work. The opposite data pair (stories late, but little to no bugs) may indicate that they are being too methodical or too cautious and you can encourage them to speed up a little. Data can not only validate or invalidate our personal judgement, but also give us ideas of places to go in and judge.

Side-to-side (peer) feedback#

Getting feedback from one’s peers (the so-called “360 review”, as in, coming from all sides) is a popular tactic, particularly around formal review time. The idea is that since we, all of us, mentally edit our interactions with those who could affect us, it’s better to get opinions and feedback from those who aren’t above us, since we’re less likely to “hide” things from our peers.

While there is a certain amount of truth to this, it’s also true that different biases will kick in. We’ve all been in the position where somebody we respect and admire has asked us to keep something a secret, whether for benign or other reasons. Even when we suspect that talking to somebody else might help that individual out, we are hesitant because we don’t want to break the trust of somebody we respect and admire. Having a team that trusts each other deeply can also affect the feedback, because nobody wants to be the “snitch” or “tattle” on another teammate.

Conversely, other biases can conspire to distort the feedback here (such as bad-mouthing a teammate in response for some real or imagined slight), all of which stem from the same basic problem: lack of psychological safety. If you see evidence that your team lacks psychological safety, take any and all peer feedback with a grain of salt unless/until it is something you can verify independently, or if it comes up from multiple sources.

“Up and over” feedback#

There’s another set of peers that can offer an important insight into your directs, too, and that’s your peers. It’s rare that your team is entirely isolated from interacting with other teams, and as part of your 1:1s with your fellow peers, you can get an entirely different perspective about your team members by hearing how they act with respect to people not on their current team. In particular, if your team is the “client” to another team’s services (perhaps your team relies on an infrastructure team to manage the cloud to which you deploy), find out how people on your team treat that other team. Do they “talk down” to the other group? Do they treat them with respect? Are they pushing deadlines and creating more work for the other team? These can all be things that won’t be visible to you directly until you chat with your peers.

Self-review#

“How do you think you’re doing?” is one of the most powerful questions you can ask during your 1:1s. Not because you are going to take their answer literally, but because it gives you an opportunity to peer into their self-perception mechanism and determine how good they are at evaluating themselves. Those who are able to clearly see their mistakes will be able to recognize those mistakes in the future, and adjust; those who don’t, repeatedly, will require deeper coaching and possibly assistance from outside you (such as training classes or the HR team) to be able to correct and improve.

Dunning-Kruger Effect: Psychologists often speak of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. For example, imagine I ask you to take a test on something you know a little bit about, but not at an expert level. Then, after you’re done but before you know your results, I’ll ask you how you think you did on the test. Those who are deep into Dunning-Kruger will often overestimate their success. Then, again before showing you your results, I show you the tests given to a few other folks who also took the test. If you are still deep into the Dunning-Kruger effect, you will note that others answered differently than you, and conclude that they must be wrong—you are still convinced of your own success, even in the face of more objective data that can (and should) suggest you are incorrect. For those who are interested, the effect is explained by the fact that the metacognitive ability to recognize deficiencies in your own knowledge or competence requires that you possess at least a minimum level of the same kind of knowledge or competence, which those who exhibit the effect have not attained. Because they are unaware of their deficiencies, such people generally assume that they are not deficient, in keeping with the tendency of most people to “choose what they think is the most reasonable and optimal option.” Which, if you think about it, explains the comments section of the internet.

The other reason to ask your directs’ opinions of their work is as a way to determine how closely aligned your thinking and theirs is. Remember, performance reviews should never be a surprise, but this can still happen even with plenty of foreshadowing if the conversation always goes one-way. Asking your report to tell you what’s in their head is a form of active listening, because it gives you a chance to ask more questions, probing in certain areas, to get a better sense of how they explain or justify to themselves the different opinion they have of their work. Or, conversely, if their opinion is too low, you can readjust their expectations, so that they don’t continue to work on something that’s already “done.”

Lastly, asking your directs for their analysis of their own work helps them to be able to do so for themselves outside of the 1:1, which in turn can put “your voice in their head,” and allow them to make decisions about the work without having to consult with you directly. Over time, if you and your employee can get closely aligned, you find that they start acting like an extension of yourself, and that’s when things really begin to get interesting.